My Vagina Smells Like Shame

Since educating myself through my own personal project The Vagina Times, I’ve discovered so much about our systemic culture of shame which has prompted women to mutilate, bleach and douche their genitals to eliminate their natural shape, colour and smell. It’s truly heartbreaking. Because shame stems from someone else’s emotional repression. And their beliefs become internalized until we perpetutate them and shame our daughters.

When women perpetuate their own emotional repression on our girls, we’re fighting a losing battle.

In fact, for me this is the worst aspect of vulval and vaginal shame. We not only betray ourselves, but we betray our daughters. In the most extreme examples, mothers hold down their struggling, screaming daughters with other female village elders to go through horrific female genital mutilation because those women are shamed so strongly, that they think it is better put their daughters through a mentally, emotionally and physically scarring procedure – to cut away all existence of the vulva and sew up the vagina like it was never there – than it is to admit that women were born with the capacity of enjoying ourselves sexually. And that we have a vulva and vagina specifically designed to do so.

But even for those of us who don’t come from cultures like these, we are shamed in other ways. Here’s what Eldiese, a self proclaimed lipstick lesbian in Australia had to say about it:

You also need to smell fresh as a daisy everywhere whenever you see her after that, and I mean everywhere! God forbid the lady is performing the ever sacred going down dance and doesn’t like what she sniffs! My advice ladies, the sacred lotus flower is never going to smell like roses so breathe through your mouths!

Breathe through your mouths!!!

What I want is for my lover to glory in my smell. To breathe in my musk and feel the heat rising in his body. To lap it up even if i haven’t had a shower 2 hours before, or even 24 hours before. I don’t want him to do me a favour and breathe through his mouth. Or be disgusted… so much so that he might be able to fuck it, but never to kiss it.

What I want is to love myself and my smell and have him love it too. And so I must lose my shame.

Because the large majority of smells in themselves are neutrally perceived including natural bodily odour. It is our reaction to them which is a conditioned response. (I wouldn’t have believed it before I had children, but they have no ‘ugh’ to poo, spiders or rotten food. And definitely not to vagina).

When you first smell a new scent, you link it to an event, a person, a thing or even a moment. Your brain forges a link between the smell and a memory — associating the smell of chlorine with summers at the pool or lilies with a funeral. When you encounter the smell again, the link is already there, ready to elicit a memory or a mood. How Stuff Works

For most of us growing up in this culture our response to vagina, it’s shape, colour and smell, is SHAME. My mother made sure of that.

Here’s the thing. Your vagina smells and tastes fantastic to those who love you (and even sometimes those who don’t). If it doesn’t, it only means that they are themselves buried in shame. And you know deep down, no matter how hard you scrub your vagina or how many times a day you douche, you will never be rid of shame. Because it doesn’t come off with soap and water, it only dissolves with love. As if it was never there. So love you and your smell and others will too. It’s really that simple.

This piece originally appeared on Postmodern Woman. Republished with permission.

Image by Jim Cooke.